by Jo Graham
He reached for me, but I pushed his hand back. “Wait,” I said. “Let me do this. Let me see you.”
He stood still while I hung the waistcoat. I walked behind him and undid the black ribbon that held his hair, spreading it in a copper river down his back. From behind him, I lifted his shirt over his head.
Redhead fair, indeed. Long red hair and skin as creamy as a girl’s. But no girl was ever muscled that way. I ran my hand along the line of his shoulder, traced one long white scar around his ribs. His stomach was flat, and he shivered at my touch.
“Beautiful,” I said, looking up at his face, at the longing there, his lips slightly parted. “Do you know that you’re beautiful?”
Michel blushed. He glanced away.
I put my hand to his face. “Look at me,” I whispered. “I want you to see me looking at you.”
He turned his face against my hand, kissing my palm. His eyes met mine, scared and hungry at the same time, half wanting and half dreading what I seemed to promise.
“And be still,” I said, smiling.
I put my hands on his shoulders and ran them lightly down his chest, so lightly that I felt the goose bumps rise. Pale skin and bronze curls, running in a straight line down to his waistband. I stopped and played with one nipple, feeling it slack between my fingers. Then I bent and suckled it, drawing and licking as though he were a woman.
He certainly wasn’t, from the size of the erection pushing at me through his breeches. He made some incoherent noise. His hand moved, then stopped as I closed my fingers around his wrist, pressing it back to his side.
“Be still,” I said. “Wait.”
I unbuttoned his breeches and pushed them down around his hips; sharp bones and another scar, this one across the top of his hip, angling toward the groin. His phallus was hard and thick, jutting straight forward out of a nest of red hair, almost purple with blood. Very deliberately, holding his eyes with mine, I went down on my knees and took it in my mouth. He moaned and swayed, catching on to the edge of the dresser for balance. The flame dipped, shadows moving around the room.
Large and thick. I couldn’t take all of it at once, so I played with it, drawing and licking, almost letting go and just pressing my lips to the tip. I looked up at him. His face was almost white.
“This can’t be taken,” I said. “It can only be given.”
I worked his breeches off, boots and stockings. More scars. The half-healed one on his right leg crossed over an older one, while his left foot a mass of seams like a starburst. I ran my fingers along it.
“Bayonet through the foot,” he said, somewhat breathlessly. “Now . . .”
I shook my head, smiling. “Go and lie down. I don’t want you to fall over.”
I led him to the bed and sat down beside him, pressing him back against the pillows. Moreau had had this power over me, but until now I had never understood what he felt, the power of someone lovely and trembling in your hands, ready for you to make them into another person.
It was almost too much for him, keeping still. Almost, but not quite.
“Open your legs,” I said, and knelt between them, my rose dress falling around me in puddles of soft fabric, half concealing and half disclosing. And then I bent over him again. As I took him in my mouth, his hands clenched on the bedcovers, his back arching. Not quite. Not quite to the edge.
My hair had fallen down, honey gold brushing against the insides of his thighs. I lifted my head. “Put that pillow under your head,” I said. “I want you to see what I’m doing. I want you to see exactly what you look like.”
He did it, biting his lip.
I ran my hands along the insides of his thighs, muscled from a lifetime on horseback, a lifetime of fencing, feeling the shape of him under his skin like cream.
I gathered my hair in my hands and slapped the inside of his thigh with it, stinging like a horsehair whip. His entire body arched. Again. I took the flat of my hand and slapped harder, the crack of my hand against him loud in the quiet room. Then I bent and kissed the red mark I had left.
“You like pain, don’t you?”
He made some insensible noise.
I slid my body up his, lifted his chin in my hand. “What did you say?”
“Under the right circumstances.” He was trying to get at me through my dress, hips moving against me.
“No.” I sat up, straddling him. “Not yet. You have to watch.” Very deliberately, I lifted my dress. I had nothing under it. I moved on him, closing my hand around him and putting it where he wanted it to go, making him watch every movement. And then I sank down on him, feeling him filling me, wide and stretching. One slow movement.
“Like that,” I said. “These are the right circumstances.”
He came with a noise that was almost a scream, and I rode him. Not quite enough for me. As he softened in me, I put my hand down and touched, soft flesh parted by him, my pearl tight and needy. And I used him for my pleasure, touching until the ripples built into a flood, one, two, three tight convulsions.
“God,” he said. “I can feel you.”
“Feel me,” I said, and closed my eyes and gave in to it.
Afterward, I unbuttoned the dress and dropped it over the side of the bed, then slid in beside him, skin against skin, pulling the linen sheets loose and the duvet over us. I lay on my side, wrapped against his left shoulder, while he lay on his back. Our hair mingled on the pillow, red and gold alike. I bent my lips softly to his shoulder. He was shaking like a racehorse, the contest over.
“God, Elza,” he said, and bent his lips to my hair.
“Too much?”
“No.” He wrapped his arms tightly around me. “Just enough.”
I kissed him, sweet as a girl with her first lover, warm and tender with the lethargy of release. It was as though something had broken between us, something brittle that had held back the tide, and now there was nothing between us, no barrier, as though we flowed together like fire and fire.
I felt him close his eyes.
And I just held him while his breathing stilled, quiet in the candlelight.
“You’ve never done anything like that before,” I said.
“No. It’s intense.”
I nodded. “If it’s too much, you can tell me. It’s—”
“It’s not too much.” He shifted a little, pulling me tighter. For a moment I thought he wouldn’t say any more, but then he did. “Usually I’m afraid I’ll hurt someone.”
“I’m more likely to hurt you this way,” I said. My leg was against his, the inside of my thigh against his hip. “I suppose you’re not used to that idea.”
“You won’t hurt me.”
“I won’t mean to,” I said.
He turned his head and looked at me. “If I wanted a woman who wasn’t dangerous, I wouldn’t have come looking for you.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t have.”
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said softly, “Elza?”
“Yes?”
“Was there supposed to be dessert?”
He sounded so plaintive that I started laughing. “Didn’t you have enough dinner?”
“I’ve worked up an appetite since then.”
“There’s cheese and plums and Madeira,” I said, sitting up. “I could go get them.”
“I could help.”
He got up, and we brought everything back to the bedroom. We sat up in bed eating plums and Manchego, sprawling naked in the candlelight, drinking tawny Madeira out of my only two glasses. It was the best food I had ever eaten. The plums were sweeter than any fruit had ever been, and I held one for him to eat and tasted it on his tongue. Watching him eat it out of my hand was oddly sensual.
“I thought grapes were traditional for a conqueror?” he said, leaning back against the pillow.
I laughed. “I don’t have any grapes. I didn’t see any in the market this morning.”
“We could look for them tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve always wanted someone to
feed me grapes.”
“Maybe you should feed me grapes,” I said. “Turn and turn about.”
He smiled at me and dipped his forefinger in the glass of Madeira, carefully gilding my breast with one golden drop. Then he bent to lick it off, smoky and sweet at the same time. Which led to a tangle of sheets and limbs, to making love in candlelight, warm and laughing.
It was the hour before dawn when we pulled the sheets back on the bed. The candle had burned out. I lay down on his shoulder again.
I was nearly asleep when he suddenly said, “Letters?”
“It’s not the right time to worry,” I said sleepily. “My courses are due. I thought of that hours ago.”
“I’m glad you have more sense than I do.”
“I have more risk,” I said, closing my eyes. I really didn’t want to think about it at the moment.
His arm tightened around me. “I would never desert you if it came to that.”
“No, you probably wouldn’t.” I put one hand against his hip, feeling the softness of skin over sharp bones. “You think you’re a white knight, a Paladin of Charlemagne.”
“I am a Paladin of Charlemagne,” he said quietly. “Where do you think they go? Do they really sleep for centuries in the hollow hills, waiting for Roland’s horn to sound?”
I smiled and curled tighter. “Next you’ll tell me that you threw Excalibur in a lake.”
“Not in a lake,” he said. “But there was a sword.”
“You are the most impossible romantic,” I said, and fell asleep in his arms.
In the City of Light
I was awakened in the morning by the sounds of Michel behind the screen, going about necessary morning functions. I heard him pouring water in the washbasin, then a loud splashing, as though he had suddenly ducked his head. He came out from behind the screen, shaking his wet head, naked and completely unselfconscious.
I sat up, the sheet around my waist. For a moment we just looked at each other. I wasn’t sure what to say that wasn’t either too much or too little.
He came and sat down on the side of the bed. “What am I supposed to say?” he asked.
“How about good morning?” I said. He was as awkward as I was. It had been too intimate, too real, and now it seemed odd to find him almost a stranger.
“Good morning,” he said. He gathered up my hair in his hands, playing with the long strands, a tentative smile on his face. “And how about breakfast?”
“I don’t have anything,” I said. “I wasn’t really planning—”
“We could go out.”
And we did. We had breakfast in a tavern that he knew, a place by the river that was full of soldiers having a late breakfast and teamsters who had hauled in produce for the markets having an early lunch before they started home to the country. We ate fried potatoes and sausages while sitting at a long trestle table. Birds flew in and out the open doors, perching on the rafters high above and flitting down to eat the crumbs that fell beneath the tables. One bold bird landed on our table and begged. Michel threw him a bit of bread, and he took off to the beams above with his prize, followed by four or five other birds.
“Jealous fellows,” Michel said. “He’ll have to fight to keep it. But at least he’s got it to start with.”
Afterward, we wandered through the markets at Les Halles. Apples, wine, fish, it was all the same to me. We walked arm in arm in the autumn sunshine, laughing and talking about everything—plays I had been in, places he had traveled, books we had both read. We bought grapes and cheese and bread and beer and ate again sitting on the quay, watching the river traffic. My feet hung down over the water, clad in worn half boots. He put his arm around my waist and I leaned back on him, laughing. I had always heard that Paris was the city of lovers, but this was the first day I’d believed it.
He kissed me, and a couple of sailors cheered, drifting downriver on a powder barge toward the Champs de Mars. Across the river the mellow fronts of townhouses glowed. The Pont Neuf angled toward the Boulevard Saint-Michel. He tasted of beer and warm skin, sunlight and autumn.
When a different kind of hunger threatened, we went back to my apartment. I felt stiff and a bit sore, and wasn’t terribly surprised when I went behind the screen and checked that my courses had come on hard. Since I had ended the pregnancy last winter, they had been erratic, sometimes showing up every seven or eight weeks and barely there, other times coming on heavy and uncomfortable. This looked heavy. I wished it could have been any other day. Any day other than the perfect day.
I rearranged myself and came out from behind the screen. Michel was in the salon, building a fire in the stove. The night would be chilly.
The fire flared. His face was solemn and intent, illuminated briefly, then dropped into darkness. Michel stood up, dusting his hands on his coat and closing the stove door. “Are you cold?” he asked.
“A little,” I said. Mostly I just felt disappointed. I would need to tell him to go soon.
“I could warm you up,” he said disingenuously. A day before I would have wondered if he meant it innocently, but now I knew better. He could manage that perfectly innocent expression, but not hide the amusement in his eyes.
“Lechery,” I said. “You aren’t as wholesome as you look.”
He put his arms around me, but I didn’t kiss him. “What’s the matter?”
I shrugged. “It’s the wrong time. I told you my courses were due. I just hate for this day to end.” I didn’t want him to leave, but I could hardly ask him to stay and do nothing. And he would hardly want more, under the circumstances.
Michel took a step back. “Don’t you want to go to bed?”
“Well, yes,” I said. This was not the sort of thing one talked about, and it felt distinctly awkward, too intimate. “I mean, I want it, but men find it kind of disgusting.”
His brow wrinkled. “You think I’m afraid of a little blood?”
“When you put it that way . . .”
He put his hands on my shoulders. “Show me what you like. It doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you.”
And so I showed him. Lying together in the dark, he put his hand over mine and I showed him exactly what I liked, exactly the pressure, exactly where, hearing his breathing quicken with mine, knowing that it excited him to excite me, to hear my moans and to feel the wetness. If he was not as practiced a lover as Moreau, he was no green boy either, and he knew enough to know that every woman is different. I said so afterward, when we lay together half asleep.
“So is every sword,” he said. “Or every flute.”
I looked up at him, a vague shadow in the darkness. The curtains were drawn. “You play the flute?”
He nodded. “Not very well. But I enjoy it.”
“You are so strange sometimes,” I said, leaning back against him.
“What’s strange about playing the flute?”
I searched for the words. “It just doesn’t fit with the image.”
“I should play a more manly instrument, like the bassoon?” Michel laughed. “Consider where I’d carry a bassoon on campaign. And how much it would bother the camp to have me practicing the bassoon late at night.”
I giggled, imagining the general’s tent with the sounds of bassoon practice emerging. “I suppose the flute is practical. But it seems so contradictory.”
“And everything about you fits together neatly?”
“No,” I said. It was easier to talk in the dark when I couldn’t see his face, just feel the warmth of his arm around me, his scarred shoulder against my cheek. “There’s Charles.”
He was quiet a moment. “Is Charles your son?”
I took a breath, but couldn’t quite answer.
“I saw the stretch marks last night. I thought that you must have a child, and I wondered . . .” He stopped, then went on. “I’m trying to say, if you have a child farmed out somewhere because you . . . Well, if you wanted to have him here with us—I mean, with you—it would be better, wouldn’t it? I like
children. I grew up with a big family, remember? And if you wanted him here with you . . . Is he Moreau’s son? Because if so, that makes him an even bigger ass—”
I put my hand to his lips. “Michel, no.” Tears stung my eyes, and I pressed my face against his shoulder for a moment. One of his hands moved against my hair. Something hurt, and I wasn’t quite sure what it was.
I lifted my head. “I have two sons,” I said. “Klaas and Francis. They’re with their father. I haven’t seen them in four and a half years. They think I’m dead.” It had hurt for so long. Who could I talk to about it? Moreau would not even have begun to understand. He would have been jealous of anything that claimed my attention from him, even a child of his.
“Who’s their father?”
“My husband,” I said. “Jan Ringeling.” I hadn’t said his name in years. It seemed like another person who had been his wife.
“Oh.” He took a breath. “I thought you weren’t married.”
“He’s Dutch,” I said. “He won’t divorce me. I left him years ago for Moreau. And then you know how that went.”
“I do,” he said. “Barras’s lady told me.”
“Joséphine?” I was surprised he knew her. This was safer ground.
Michel seemed to understand that. “Yes. Madame Bonaparte. I’ve talked with her several times. The first time I was in Paris was when I went to that party of yours, and I met her then. Director Barras asked me to stay at his house. Which was sort of . . . unexpected. She’s very nice. And I mean that truthfully, not in the false way people mean when they say that and mean that someone is boring.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Politics,” I said. “I can see exactly why he invited you to stay. Moreau was out of favor, so Barras was entertaining other generals from the Rhine. I imagine he found you weren’t enough of a political animal and didn’t invite you again.”
Michel shifted uncomfortably. “Either that, or it was because I assaulted his valet.”
“You what?”
His voice was a little defensive, his provincial accent a little broader. “I didn’t grow up with servants, remember? I don’t know what they do, creeping around the house when everyone is sleeping. His valet came into my room early in the morning to brush my coat or some other damn-fool thing, and I thought he was a thief.”